Introduction

Roger Hart, Louise Chawla, and Sheridan Bartlett

This first issue of Children, Youth, and Environments (CYE) rekindles an enterprise that goes back 30 years. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June of 1974, a small group of researchers, planners and designers came together during the fifth annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) to talk about the quality of environments for children. This group discussed the need for a newsletter that could become a forum for their shared interests. No existing journals on children filled this role: none of them was truly interdisciplinary, and they failed to bridge the gaps between theory, research and practice. None had the graphic quality that is so vital in discussing the material world and spatial relationships, and none gave attention to reports of action projects.

And so the Childhood City Newsletter was born– an expression of the zeitgeist of its time. It was to be a low-cost, highly graphic alternative to more conventional journals, without the detached formality that many were finding troubling in “serious” academic publications. Rather, it would encourage contributors to share the reasons for their personal involvement, and to consider the larger social and political implications of their work. It would reflect a belief in participatory democracy and in interdisciplinary activity in universities, and it would give expression to the newly recognized importance of the quality of the physical environment. A generation later, this core mission remains virtually unchanged in CYE.

The Ph.D. program in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) took on the task of coordinating the effort, and volume 1, number 1 came out in the summer of 1974. It had been agreed that other groups would also produce some of the newsletters, and sometimes they did. But the task largely became CUNY’s, and it grew in size as the years passed. Somehow, we managed to produce four useful issues per year– many of them theme issues that people still request. After eight years of banging out the newsletter on a typewriter, a generous gift of a computer and printer from a progressive child research and production company, The Child Growth and Development Corporation, simplified the production process somewhat.

We were now receiving many full length articles, but resisted becoming a “real” journal for fear of losing some of the qualities and contributors we so valued. It became increasingly clear, however, that many in our network wanted a refereed journal, and with our new equipment we had the print quality to produce a more formal publication. We decided to create a journal but to make it clear to everyone that we welcomed all kinds of contributions– both the highly academic and the more informal reports of various professionals and non-professionals. Our choice of an editorial board, our selection of reviewers and our regular inclusion of news and other items helped us to negotiate this often tricky balance. It took vigilance and care to maintain academic legitimacy without becoming just another academic journal.

We took this opportunity, also, to create a new title for our efforts – it became Children’s Environments Quarterly, and later just Children’s Environments. The original name, Childhood City Newsletter, turned out to have been an unfortunate choice. For many would-be contributors, it conveyed an overly informal quality. More significantly, it carried an unintended implication– that we believed in some kind of separate world for children. But Children's Environments as a title was also off the mark. We liked its simplicity, but it was a mistake not to make more explicit the fact that the focus was intended to include teenagers as well. Eventually, when the electronic CYE network was created, it was clear that the word “youth” belonged in the title, as it does in the title of the revived journal.

After a year or two of producing Children’s Environments Quarterly, we decided to explore the possibility of having a publisher take over production. Some major journal publishers expressed an interest, but wanted to change most of what we believed in and what made our journal unique. We were told that to be economically feasible, it could not be so interdisciplinary; it needed a specialized audience with membership loyalty. Our commitment to linking theory and research to practice was seen as even more of a problem. We were also told to remove all graphics in order to look like a serious journal. We felt we had no choice but to return to licking our own stamps. For another eight years we soldiered on, doing our own production and distribution before finally giving in to our need for help. After a difficult year with a U.S. publisher, we moved to a British publisher with a good understanding of, and support for, our goals. For a while it went well, but then came the buyouts, staff turnover, and changes in values that have been increasingly common in the commercial publishing world. The price shot up, readership went down, and we reluctantly decided to end the relationship.

For a few years it seemed that the school of Public Health in the University of California, Berkeley, might take over publication of the journal, but negotiations collapsed in the end. People continued to recognize the need for the journal, and there were on-going discussions about ways to revive it. But it took the enormous dedication and energy of one of our long-term collaborators, Willem van Vliet-, together with his colleagues in the University of Colorado, to bring it back to life. We are extremely happy with this turn of events. New life will be given to the many issues of the old journal hidden in our cupboards, and the original mission will be maintained, free of the feudal for-profit publishing system that is ever leaner and meaner on the operations side, and yet more and more expensive on the subscribers' side.

The new journal and its predecessors are closely related in terms of overall philosophy and mission, but there are also some very welcome changes and developments. For example, when we began Children’s Environments Quarterly, most of its articles came from high-income industrialized countries like Canada, the United States, Japan and the countries of northern Europe. As editors, we became gradually conscious and convinced of the need for a more global focus, and during the journal’s later years, articles from the rest of the world began to appear more frequently (as did evidence of our concern with issues of poverty and social and environmental justice.) But our networks at that time had not yet expanded to the point where we found it possible to have a truly international journal.

We considered increased attention to research and practice in the South to be important for several reasons. More than 98 percent of the world’s children are born in the countries of the developing world. Many of them face serious threats to their health and well-being from poor housing and sanitation, pollution, exposure to disease and environmental risks, community violence, dangerous or stressful work settings, a lack of safe play space and access to education and basic services, and the loss of biodiversity and natural areas that should be their national heritage. It was important for the journal to feature research about these problems and examples of programs and design approaches that creatively address them. We recognized, too, that these problems are not unique to the developing world, nor independent of the political and economic forces that shape the lives of children in the North. Because many of the most innovative responses to these problems are developed in the South, we believed that readers everywhere had much to gain from a North-South exchange of research and practice.

The launch of CYE is a promising step forward toward meeting these goals. A review of this initial issue shows articles from around the world, including research and practice from Brazil, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Paraguay, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Zimbabwe. A special section on street children edited by Jill Swart-Kruger, with an introduction co-authored by Judith Ennew, provides a much needed update on practice, research and reflection in this field of work. Both Ennew and Swart-Kruger are veterans of efforts to establish effective policies and programs in this area.

In other ways, when we were working on the final issues of Children’s Environments in 1995, we could not have foreseen the possibilities that CYE is realizing. We wanted the journal to carry articles from all corners of the world and be easily accessible to readers around the globe. Given the for-profit motives of publishers, this was a point of frustration. Now, with the possibilities of an online journal, each issue will be available to everyone who has access to the internet. We anticipate that this will mean a global community of readers as well as authors, able to contribute research, commentaries and news much more quickly than we could do in the past. We’re grateful to the new editors’ dedication to reviving the journal in this form. The web-based location also makes other features available that we did not anticipate in 1995. For instance, to this day, we get requests for articles from back issues of Children’s Environments Quarterly and Children’s Environments; as the new editors note in their introduction, the process of scanning back issues to make them available electronically through the CYE website is underway.

Back in the 1970s, we were confident that we could change the world– or at least our small interdisciplinary part of it. We were less aware then of the scale of global problems– or perhaps the problems really have become more vast and intractable now. Poverty, inequality and income polarization have increased worldwide, and the environments that shape the lives of so many children are stark reminders of these facts. Ironically, many of the issues we discussed in the 1970s– especially issues related to physical space in U.S. cities– have become global problems. Increasingly, we see around the world not only the loss of biodiversity, but the erosion of public space, constraints in the access of children to space they control and a diminished sense of belonging. These are daunting concerns for this journal to address.

Fortunately, there has also been progress on a number of fronts. The study of children has truly become more interdisciplinary and creative; there is a greatly increased acceptance of action research and of participation as the basis for positive change. Attention to children’s rights has also grown apace in recent years, spurred by strong international support for the Convention on the Rights of the Child since its acceptance by the United Nations in 1989. The right of children to protection and care– as well as to an active voice in matters that concern them– has been almost universally recognized and ratified, if not universally acted upon. The children’s rights movement, however, has tended to place little emphasis on the physical environments that have such profound effects on children, and that children themselves repeatedly point to when asked about the quality of their lives. This journal has a critical role to play in this regard– providing a reminder of the fundamental importance of the material world in realizing children’s rights, and allowing for discussion of the most productive ways forward. We are delighted to be a part of this revived enterprise.

Many people worked on the original journal as volunteers over the years- typing, waxing the pages and laying them out, as well as being ready with advice and support. It is impossible to mention them all, but a number have played consistently important roles from the start and are still with us today, including Robin Moore, Gary Moore, Cecilia Castelino, Lee Rivlin and Mark Francis. Also, almost from the beginning, we have had the essential commitment of Selim Iltus, first as a graduate student and then as the Co-Director of the Children's Environments Research Group. He was always trying to improve he journal within our very modest means. He was also very concerned with improving communication between our members and many years later set up the CYE electronic network. No longer with us, to our great regret, is Joost van Andel, who also played a role in setting up in the electronic network, and who was always an active presence on the CYE front.

We greet the launch of CYE with heartfelt good will. Here is an expanded, accessible new resource for everyone interested in the quality of young people’s environments. Pass the word along!